


Surefire Way to Die

by Scarlet66



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Because I'm too much of an emotional wimp to write about a situation where someone dies, F/M, Friendship, Some Fluff, This ship is killing me, hints of romance, no one dies, the title is misleading
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-21
Updated: 2015-05-21
Packaged: 2018-03-31 10:50:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3975313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scarlet66/pseuds/Scarlet66
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>Having feelings for someone when you're in the Survey Corps is about as suicidal as stepping outside the walls and throwing away your blades, emptying your gas, and abandoning your horse.</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Surefire Way to Die

 

Levi doesn't know when he starts to consider Hange Zoe, of all people, a friend.

The woman is made of almost everything he finds annoying: she's loud and messy and doesn't give a rat's ass about hygiene; she's curious about too many things, sometimes to the extent of being invasive; she doesn't know when to stop talking, a trait that worsens when she takes interest in _titans_ , of all things.

Hange Zoe is weird, because she is almost everything that is annoying, and yet Levi can't find it in him to really hate her. 

It's a week after returning from his first expedition that she comes to find him and offers him lunch. ('I promised I would!' she says after rudely interrupting his daily cleaning routine.) For the two weeks after that, he continuously refuses, until he gives in when he realizes threats of extreme violence don't work on her, and figures it'd be easier to just go along with it so she'll never bother him again.

She comes back and talks to him about the possible extent of the diversity of wildlife outside the walls the next day. 

Calling her names doesn't work. Threatening to carve her up or break her face or snap her bones doesn't work. So he gives up and listens.

He surprises himself when she starts talking about the mysteries of a titan's digestive tract and he finds some of the things she rambles about kind of... interesting. (Even Hange herself is kind of startled: 'I'm five minutes into my spiel and you haven't left yet. WOW.')

There isn't any doubt that she's smart — she's probably the most intelligent person he's ever known, aside from Erwin or Farlan, but her brand of intelligence is different. Everyone else he has known possesses (or possessed) skills and wits necessary for survival, and survival alone. Hange's genuine curiosity in anything and everything that interests her is, without a doubt, also rooted in survival — he wouldn't have listened to her for so long if it wasn't — but it also stems from _her_ ; her fascination with the unknown is part of her like Levi's hatred for dirt and mold is a part of him. Her obsession is like a fire in the underground; it burns in her eyes with the same intensity, the direct opposite of the muted despair reflected in every other set of eyes in the Survey Corps.

He remembers — clearly — that the first words she ever said to him were inspired by that same curiosity. Not by a desire to use or manipulate him; just pure, simple interest.

So he learns to listen to her rants about 'science'. He begins to respond to her, with minimal amounts of actual speaking on his part, when she waves at him or greets him. He even comes to tolerate her state of perpetual filthiness. (It doesn't stop him from calling her out on it, or snapping at her to learn to take a bath at least once every few days.) Things get tricky when she has to move into his room after hers gets flooded because of one of her weirdass experiments, because now he actually has to live with her filth, but he deals with it. Somehow. 

That's their entire relationship — he tolerates her. That's all. 

So when he wakes up from a nightmare about dirty red hair covering vacant, mud-covered green eyes bulging out of a head separated from the rest of her body, and salutes of farewell to swallowing to _pulling him out only to realize there's only half of him there_ , and finds Hange staring at him in alarm, all he wants is for her to _get the fuck away from him._

But she stays.

She stays, and he turns his back to her and faces the wall and screams at her that no, nothing is wrong and she should get the hell out before he shuts her up permanently and she'll never talk his ear off about titans or whatever shit she happens to be interested in again. And then it's quiet, quieter than it's ever been with Hange in a room, so he thinks, _'_ _good, she's gone, I've finally gotten rid of her'_ , until he feels the area of the bed behind him dip and then her weight settle against his back.

He wants to shove her away and run. He doesn't. 

She starts talking about everything and nothing — from the state of her shit that morning to the state of the shit they called food that night. If she feels the way his shoulders shudder with every breath he takes, she doesn't say anything.

The night is cold, so he focuses on the warmth on his back until he falls asleep again. When morning comes, she's still there.

 

* * *

 

Hange Zoe doesn't remember falling for Levi.

All she remembers is a year of friendship — which mostly consisted of her pestering him and him grunting back at her, and her trying to nudge her way through his walls but not hard enough for them to completely collapse on both of them — and then stumbling in through his door (the one he moved to after he got promoted, lucky bastard) after finally completing Wall Maria's evacuation, half-delirious with pain and grief.

She wakes up in his bed with vague memories of being dumped in the bath, fingers roughly scrubbing shampoo into her hair, clothes being shoved at her and his voice telling her to get dressed and go to sleep. His scent — lavender? — is on his pillow and in his sheets, and all she can coherently think of is that it feels nice, laying there all wrapped up in his presence. It's warm and familiar, and for a moment she can make herself think that it will be there forever. That it won't go away and leave her cold and alone like so many of her friends have already.

She blinks, rolls over with a muffled groan, and the first thing she sees after white sheets and faint sunlight is Levi asleep, still fully dressed, sitting slightly slumped in his chair, arms folded across his chest. The paperwork he had been poring over last night is neatly stacked and finished — because Levi would never go to sleep and leave his work incomplete — on top of his desk.

The first thing she thinks of is that she has never seen someone quite so... stressed, even as they sleep; there's a crease between his eyebrows and a small frown on his lips and she can imagine him waking up straight into a scowl. It almost makes her laugh, because of course Levi of all people — Levi, who never misses a minute of training, who never fails to keep his gear in pristine condition, who never shows a fleck of emotion outside of his usual pissed off expression — would never allow himself to let his guard down, even when he's resting. (She wonders what would happen if she were to attack him this very instant, but shoves the thought aside because he probably hasn't gotten more than three hours of sleep, judging from the state of the bags under his eyes.)

The second thing that comes to mind is gratitude — and not for the first time; he cleaned her and gave her his bed, and while he wasn't without his usual grumbling and cussing while he went about it, he didn't ask questions and he didn't kick her out. That is how Levi shows kindness — something she learned from the first time he cleaned her wounds, roughly but quickly so as to prevent infection, the fifth time he called her disgusting which happened to be the first time he forced her to bathe, and the first time he dragged her back to her room to a steaming bowl of soup after she had spent three consecutive days in her lab. He's rude and he's crass but when she rants to him about her discoveries he always listens quietly and attentively, and that's why she one-sidedly names him her new best friend, because no one else would have the patience to sit there for an hour listening to her rave about plants.

And something about him, sleeping, looking — not peaceful, but relatively so, at least compared to when he's awake, triggers something within her and it breaks and leaks and blooms across her chest. She can't explain it, can't identify anything about it except that it doesn't feel _bad_ , and for a second that bothers her like nothing else, because she's Hange Zoe and it's her job to explain the unknown. But all it takes is a look at him for her to realize that she doesn't mind it. She almost doesn't even care to know, and that scares her in a way titans never could. 

Then he stirs, and it's just as she predicted — he blinks and shifts a little in his chair, and when he catches sight of her looking at him he slips immediately into his trademark scowl. 

And something about it takes her breath away, and there's that feeling again, that warmth that spreads in her chest as she lies there enveloped in his blankets and the safety of his bed. The words bubble up her throat, but before she has a chance to blurt them out, he says,

"Feeling better now that you've stolen my shirt and my bed?"

 _Yes_ , she wants to say. _Thank you. I love you._

And then she's silent, because _thank god_ she didn't say that out loud. Thank god he interrupted her before she did something that would kill them both.

Instead she laughs, loudly and boisterously like always, as she sits up and stretches, like nothing is wrong. Like she didn't barge into his room at the ungodliest of hours, exhausted and empty, and have him take care of her. Like she didn't just realize she had feelings she would rather not have for her best friend, for a man she should not have those kinds of feelings for.

She smiles broadly and thanks him as she exchanges his shirt for her own clothes, he glares at her and mutters something about cleaning up after herself properly because, _for fuck's sake_ , she's an adult and she should act like one, and she can almost make herself believe that it's business as usual as she skips out of his room.

 

* * *

 

Having feelings for someone when you're in the Survey Corps is about as suicidal as stepping outside the walls and throwing away your blades, emptying your gas, and abandoning your horse.

Levi hates that it's comforting to have Hange's back against his, even when she's the one who's leaning on him and crying her eyes out. Hange hates that she loves to sit on his bed wrapped in layers of his blankets, even when he's the one whose ears need to be talked to kingdom come because she doesn't want him to be thinking unnecessary thoughts.

It's convenient, this symbiosis they have, because when they're back to back he doesn't have to worry about wiping away her tears, and she doesn't have to see the cracks forming in his eyes and in his face every time he lets people die. When she's huddled under a pile of sheets on his bed he doesn't have to try to refrain from grabbing her shoulders and shaking her or pulling her to him to make sure she doesn't charge headfirst into a titan's jaws, and she doesn't have to try to restrain herself from throwing her arms around him to make sure he doesn't leave her like everyone else always does.

They don't try to get any closer, physically or emotionally, because they don't want to have to carry a burden that would break them the day it isn't there anymore.

 

* * *

 

Unsurprisingly, Hange's the one who (reluctantly) brings it up first.

"So what are we gonna do about this?" she asks as she looks over piles upon piles of notes while she sits on his bed — freshly bathed, thank god — and Levi chalks it up to years of being in each other's presence that he immediately understands what she means from the uncharacteristically soft, almost uncertain tone of her voice. 

"Is there a need to do something about it?" He doesn't look up from his own paperwork on his desk as his pen continues scrawling words he isn't even paying attention to. He can tell he's trying too hard to make himself sound bored and indifferent — because that's when it doesn't work — when Hange looks up at him and grins.

"Nah," she says. 

They continue working in silence until the birds start chirping outside. She leaves his room with bundles of paper tucked under her arms, a tired smile and even-larger-than-usual eye bags. He sees her out with a grunt.

When he goes to the mess hall an hour later and sees that she isn't there, he sighs, eats his own food, and takes her plate down to her lab. He finds her unconscious on the floor and nudges her with his foot.

"Don't sleep on the ground, four-eyes, that's fucking nasty." 

She rolls around and groans. Her glasses slip off her face.

It's business as usual, and both of them are perfectly fine with it.

 


End file.
